Spring is commissioned by playwright/director Peter Hinton for his play titled “THE END” in 2016. The play is based on letters exchanged between a WW1 soldier Wilfred Owen and his mother Susan, a play written in 2016 to commemorate the centenary of the end of the “Great War”.
Notes from Peter Hinton:
The text of Spring is a poem by British poetess Charlotte Mew. This song appears late in the play, and it is for Susan. Having read the “worst” of what her son has survived and knowing that despite his aversion to war –and treatment in a mental hospital for shell-shock – that he is determined to return to No Man’s Land, she remembers the “optimism” of the past – when people sincerely believed the war would be over by Christmas in 1914 – and in 1915. For Mew/Susan – Spring is the great healer – and its irony is bitter comfort by 1918 – when she sings the song.